Well for quite a while I’ve been wanting to get some Nudie dry jeans… I read about these about a year and a bit ago on some site and basically Nudie are this Swedish company that sells these sick jeans that are made from dry denim. The denim is called dry because of the obvious reason that it hasn’t been washed yet. Not a little bit. Not at all.

So, why buy dry jeans? Well as they haven’t been washed – they are very susceptible to creases and wear marks and certain other characteristics that you would find ‘already there’ in regular jeans. By wearing dry jeans for an extended length of time before washing them, you can make these creases and rips and light coloured patches yourself – and make them personal to the way that you wear and treat your jeans. And when you eventually wash them (recommended 6 months of wearing!) these ‘imperfections’ and wear marks will appear and you will have you own very personal pair of jeans.

Anyway, enough of the marketing babble and such – some people think that these might be a bit of gimmick, but I thought it was worth a go! It was pretty hard to find a pair of these though… I found some in Canada last year, but they were pretty horrendously expensive (think $200+) so I held out for a little longer… Until a couple weekends ago when I found some in Urban Outfitters in Glasgow as I went over to pick up my bike frame that I won on eBay (more on that later). In terms of size, they were a little big – but I couldn’t pass on them being half price… Oh no no no! So I bought them – and am wearing them loads just to try and get some cool crease marks and other interesting things. I’ll even try and get a picture up each week (also for part of the Wear and Tear competition).

Oh and here’s some week one pictures…

Watch this space…

Again, I’ve gone through another period of being quiet and not adding too much. But I recently got a job (as a Starbucks barista) and have got lots of other interesting things to add… Including some sweet Nudie jeans, a surround sound amp, and some bits of bikes!

Stay tuned.

Just as a small post to mention a few small things, I finished reading Outliers by Gladwell, and have since then moved on to Freakonomics, which I have now basically finished, so I’m really going to have to get a pile of books ready to go, or maybe just find something else to do. However at the moment (as it happens at occasionally odd times) I’m enjoying the quest for knowledge, however useful or irrelevant it may be. Now I just need to keep this quest going all though the next academic year. Hmmm. Maybe not that easy. We’ll see. As for books, hopefully I’ll find another popular economics or statistics book to read, maybe The Long Tail as I mentioned in a previous post.

I also saw (in Waterstones) Without The Hot Air by Prof. David MacKay – the book about the calculations and statistics concerning the real world viability, usability and economics of renewable energy. I had been planning to read the eBook version for a while as it is free, but as the actual book is so beautifully typeset (by Cambridge University Press maybe? UIT) I might have to get it. This little review also made me seem that little bit more excited about it too – “The Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy.”—Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net. Mmmm…

With all this (almost) new found time here at the start of the holidays, I have actually had some time to read books that I might enjoy in a non-work related sort of way. Instead of just having to read or understand certain texts as part of my course, which can be fun and somewhat enlightening at times, it is also brilliant just to not do that for once.

And so going with this opinion and state of mind, in the middle of exam term I bought the 2600 Archive (The Best of 2600 – A Hacker’s Odyssey) book to leaf through and check out – ideally as a bit of a change to the normal stuff that I was doing (revision!). I bought it thinking that it would most likely be a reference book or a collection of old (and great) articles from 2600 that were good and worth reading, but on actually reading the book, it is clear that it is fundamentally far more than that. It is in itself a history of technology (from the 80s) starting with telephone systems going all the way up to the modern age, but it is written and presented in such a different way than everything else on the topic. The depth given is extraordinary, to such an extent that the systems mentioned and talked about are explained in such a way where you are made aware that the author of the particular article clearly knows much more than the manufacturer of the actual device in terms of it’s minute flaws and peculiar characteristics. It is truly a fascinating account of the hacker’s conquest in discovering technology throughout the last 30 years. Well worth having a look through and/or a read of.

Also in my quest to read more enjoyable things, I came across the concepts and ideas of Saber-metrics while frolicking around on Wikipedia a few weeks ago – following some interesting leads from this great New Yorker article on basketball strategy (How David Beats Goliath, New Yorker, May 11 2009 – well worth a read) And so the Wikipedia article on Saber-metrics led me to the book Moneyball – The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. It is very well written, incredibly informative and also surprisingly addictive. I also think it could still have some serious appeal to the reader if they did not know much about baseball, however, maybe a little understanding is needed… I also feel now that I should read some more about Saber-metrics, it’s pretty phenomenal!

Now having read Moneyball and slightly starting to understand/get interested in the idea of statistical outliers and anomalies in economics, sports and pretty much everything else, I stumbled upon (or rather had suggested to me) Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell which I just started yesterday. Going on the same statistical approach to life and looking closer at data and trends etc., it hopes to in some way understand what might be going on – thus sounding like an excellent light read.

Daring Fireball also suggested Free by Chris Anderson (who is also the author of The Long Tail, another book I intend to read in the near future) which I will be reading soon (provided I can be assed to read an eBook… (no success yet – not even with Eucalyptus! – Maybe because I have no current desire to really read any of Project Gutenberg’s books… Oops.)) And I also have The Bonfire of the Vanities to finish (which has been going on and off since January (if only I had the paperback edition I would be able to take it down to Cambridge more easily and actually finish it sooner).

Fun times ahead…

I had this post up on my site as of almost a year ago, but due to some website issues over the summer, it miraculously disappeared, however with the power of Google cache (and remembering various things) I have resurrected it. Enjoy…

I recently had the lucky experience of purchasing a fake Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt off of eBay. While not intending to buy a fake shirt, I did have my suspicions about buying A&F over eBay, though I have successfully bought some stuff before! Being a nice eBay citizen and everything, I thought that I should at least write an eBay guide as to how to spot fakes and the main differences between real shirts and fakes, but eBay has a rather odd (and in my opinion stupid) photo policy where they wouldn’t allow any of my Flickr photos to be linked to, so scrap that, I’m gonna post a guide on here and see if anyone finds it useful!

The purpose of this guide is to complement the other ‘How to spot fake Abercrombie clothes’ guides available on eBay by providing a photo comparison between a fake polo shirt (bought here on eBay), and a real one (bought in the A&F at The Grove in LA). The fake shirt in question is the Broadhead Trail polo shirt in grey, with “A & Fitch” written on it. For the purposes of this comparison I’m comparing it with a Broadhead Trail polo in Blue (saying “Abercrombie 92″), which I think is a fair enough comparison – so the only differences should be in the motif, the colour and the serial number. But this wasn’t necessarily true!

Firstly, I received this from the seller in a plastic bag, which is hardly A&F style presentation – so that doesn’t bode particularly well from the start. Once removed from the plastic, the feel of the shirt is very thin and definitely feels cheaper than a real A&F polo shirt. It also does not exhibit any of the ‘worn-in’ look of the real shirt, this is shown in a few pictures below. Look particularly at where the buttons are, this is clearly more worn on the blue (real) shirt.

Some of the other guides mention about the buttons being different and looking odd on the counterfeit shirts, and this, while subtle, is true! Notice the writing on the buttons and the placement of the writing on the buttons is different on each shirt. The real one has the ‘Abercrombie’ slightly away from the centre of the button, while the fake one does not! There is also a different font on the buttons, with the real buttons on the blue shirt appearing to have more bold writing on them! When looking at the side angle of the buttons, it is clear that they are different in that the fake one is obviously more of a two layer button and has a differently coloured underside.

The sewn in label also exhibits the different fonts. Looking closely and comparing the two, the ‘Established 1892′ and the ‘Unparalleled In Quality’ differ between the two shirts, with the fake one being more blocky. The writing of the ‘Abercrombie & Fitch’ is also different between the two, though more subtly, look at the base of the letter ‘b’. The tags below the sewn in label stating the size are also different dimensions and say different things – pretty odd for the same range of clothing.

The ‘Muscle’ tag also exhibits the same font difference, but it is also a different tag, with the fake one being wider.

As I mentioned before, the fake one is clearly less worn in, this is shown further around the hem on the bottom of the shirt and around the cuff…

The spare buttons are also worth mentioning in that there are two with the real shirt, and only one with the fake, and their placement in relation to the care instructions tag is different. The colour of the thread used to sew them in differs too, with the fake one having a thread that shows up on the outside of the shirt, while the blue (real) one does not.

The fit of the shirt is also worth mentioning as it obviously shows up as being fake when it does fit the same way. The cuffs are way too loose and long, and the shirt is generally too baggy. The collar, while having fairly thick material, is not thick enough to feel like the real Abercrombie shirt.

Finally, probably the most obvious difference is the incorrect tags and the tags just generally being odd. I was (and still am) pretty sure (actually I’m definitely sure) that this was a Polo shirt and not a short sleeve Henley, so then why does the tag say that this is a Henley? When I google the item number (24013206) I get an Abercrombie Henley, so it clearly isn’t the right tags. It also has the wrong price, it says $49.50, when this Polo shirt is actually $59.50. The thick ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ tag is also obviously different too.

Anyway, it seems like I’ve gone into a fairly obscene amount of detail on this, but I just wanted to provide adequate photographic evidence of the kind of fake clothes available on eBay. If you have any questions, then please ask. Good luck on spotting fakes!